We are all well-acquainted with the inaugural Artbox Singapore – the local edition of the pop-up creative market popularised in Thailand – that took place in April earlier this year.

Spanning over two weekends, the event attracted a big crowd of visitors to the extent that it received flak for being “overcrowded”; and the rainy weather only dampened (pun intended) the event further.

Fast forward seven months later, Invade – the organisers of Artbox Singapore – announced that they will be hosting a new market called Flashbang Singapore in December.

Whether they will learn from their past event and handle it better this time round in terms of logistics and layout is actually beside the point.

They Sent Out A ‘Demeaning’ Email

This time round, the spotlight is cast on Invade due to a recent email they sent out to local performers.

Screenshot of email sent by Invade to a local performer

Facebook user Amanda Tee shared a screenshot of this email on her page, sharing her disbelief at the audacity of Invade to invite her to “busk for [them] in exchange for maximum branding overexposure through shoutouts on various SoMe channels”.

In the email, the sender (staff of Invade) claimed that their previous event had “garnered over 660,000 visitors and $20,000,000 transactions over 6 days”.

Following this success, they are confident that the upcoming Flashbang event will draw similar huge crowds. They “target to draw 1,000,000 unique visitors (safe figure) over the 22-day period during peak period.”

Screenshot of Tee’s Facebook post

Tee balked at this proposal, and captioned her Facebook post with the above: “They want to pay musicians with “maximum exposure”, which bank do I bank it in ah?”.

Updating her post, she added that she hopes everyone can work together for the better – “For the bread-and-butter. Butter, notta exposure!”

Following this, Invade sent a reply to Tee in response to the earlier email: